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It was already clear on the night of the local election count that something had shifted in the Northern Irish political biosphere this election season. The DUP had gained votes, but lost seats. Sinn Féin had kept the same number of seats but had lost votes. Those designating as neither unionist nor nationalist – the ‘Others’ – had gained both votes and seats.

Unionism, with only 43 percent of first preference votes, has shrunk definitively to minority status. The gains, however, did not go mainly to their denominational opposites, the Irish Nationalist parties, but largely to Others.

Comparing the results to the last local election, Unionism has shrunk by some 26,389 votes between 2014 and 2019. Nationalism has gained 10,368. But the community of Others gained fully 65,899 first preference votes, rising to a total of 132,695, or around 19.5 percent of the vote.

Unionism’s attempt to consolidate itself around a strong, hard-line party, the DUP has succeeded in strengthening that party’s vote (though not share of seats); but unionism as a whole has shrunk down to a minority. The DUP’s gain in votes will have given them something to cheer about, but this should be set beside severe losses among other hard-line unionist parties, such as TUV and UKIP, and the ongoing decline of the UUP.

The nationalist vote has gone up, but not by a great deal,
and in any case, they did not make great gains in terms of seat numbers.

Compare the first preferences from these local election
results to the most recent Assembly election:

Assembly Election 2017:

Unionists: 360k

Nationaliists: 320k

Others: 110k

Local Elections 2019:

Unionists: 289k

Nationalists: 255k

Others: 132k

Others were already growing remarkably in 2017, passing the 100 thousand first preference vote mark for the first time. But even then, in what was a tremendously successful election, they were less than a third the size of the unionist block. Now they are approaching a half. An analysis of the voting record since, say, 2011, would show that this is a community on the rise. It is a diverse community – whose members, ranging from the conservative to the radical, have nothing to unite them other than the refusal to be governed by the dominant two-community paradigm – but it has more power than its simple numbers might indicate.

If the unionist community is now a minority community, representing little over two fifths, and the community of others now represents nearly a fifth of the voting population, the lesson seems clear: unionism needs to start reaching out to others, making Northern Ireland the sort of place non-unionists want to live, if they are to preserve the union. Unionism now needs the votes of others to make up a majority.

By the same token, nationalists are also a minority – not
even two in five. They, too, will need to persuade the others if they are to
move towards their long-term goal of a united Ireland.

This, in theory, gives the others more power than you
might think, just looking at the raw numbers.

The rise of the community of others represents a change
in the political dynamics of Northern Ireland, and may lead to the injection of
further new dynamics, not least because a good number of those others (the
Greens, People Before Profit) come from a progressive and left leaning
movement.

It’s going to be very hard for the unionists to turn this
round, because they have spent so long shoring up their own base by demonising
everyone who is not a hard-line unionist. But they need to see, now, the
diminishing returns of this strategy, especially after the imminent end of the
confidence and supply arrangement that only a very unusual set of Westminster
circumstances dropped into their surprised hands.

In practice this means making NI more like the sort of place others want to live by, for example, bringing the place up to speed on equal marriage, by showing some semblance of concern for the wishes of the majority in the region who wanted to remain in the EU, and by giving the people of NI the same reproductive healthcare rights they have elsewhere in the UK, or better. After all, they can now get all these things in the Republic of Ireland. Keep hectoring and alienating the others, and you can guarantee eventually they will lose patience, and begin to explore the potential benefits of reunification.

In other words, the biggest current threat to the union
is hard-line unionism.

For years, for decades, the Community of Others (COO) has
resisted being drawn in and ground down by the binary reduction machine of NI
politics, whereby one is obliged to ‘belong’ to one and only one of two and
only two diametrically opposed denominations. The COO is not a community of
identity – you don’t belong to it by virtue of birth, or because of some
supposedly immutable shared identity. You belong, if at all, because you know
that we need to build democracy, not domination; that society is nothing but differences; and that instead of
trying to reduce this, it is possible to embrace and enjoy those differences as
something exciting, that for all the challenges, has at least the potential to
enrich us all.

I wanted to write about Extinction Rebellion, the school children’s strikes, the David Attenborough programme on climate change this weekend, but I can’t.

I did not know Lyra McKee – did not, until now, I confess, read much of her writing – but for some reason I find myself unable to stop thinking about her life and shocking death. Nothing I can say would have half the impact of her own words, or indeed of some of those who knew her, so please just read these, and all those I’ve left out.

Reading these, it may be possible to discern some hope, that this is one of those inflection points, where people are brought up short, and rethink their whole approach to politics and to each other. Let us work to make sure Lyra’s legacy is lasting change.

Maurice reflects on the row over leaflets distributed by a DUP Councillor

It appears to have been too much even for the DUP: Councillor Graham Craig has been told by his party to stop distributing election flyers with a message that has widely been seen as racist.

As is always the way in these cases, there have been those (for instance on the Nolan Show the day the story broke) who argue that calling for “local houses for local people”, as the leaflet does, is not necessarily racist.

That’s an argument that becomes harder to sustain when the very next point in the leaflet reads: “Taking back control of immigration”. Immigration – does this need to be pointed out? – is not a Council matter; and it seems to me there is only one reason a message like that is put into a local Council leaflet.

We could point to other uses of phrases like ‘locals only’ to show that they are usually accompanied by or embodied in acts of vandalism, sometimes with a more explicitly racist context. But that would be to take the protestations too seriously. No one can be in any doubt – not even Councillor Craig – that he intended to signal, by these phrases, he would work to keep ‘others’ (‘them’ versus ‘us’) out of the houses in the area. It is virtually a dictionary definition example of xenophobia.

Look at the other phrases on the leaflet though: “As your local Unionist Councillor”, he begins – and the underlining is in the original. As though the DUP header, with its red-white-and-blue lion weren’t enough, he is at pains to emphasise that he is a Unionist, or rather Unionist.

He then lists the issues he will continue to focus his efforts on, including the issue of local homes for local people, and controlling immigration. Here is the rest of the list of his priorities:

Delivering more alley gates

More funding for Loyalist areas in need

Defending Unionism at City Hall

And here is the issue that concerns me: by the time he has finished this list, and says “As your local Councillor I will continue to work on your behalf” I already know he is not talking to me. The ‘your’ of “your behalf” refers to Unionists, Loyalists. A ‘local’ Councillor for a local, loyal people, a people Councillor Craig will continue to defend.

The dynamics Councillor Craig is appealing to here are the same that led to the rise of Donald Trump in the US and to Brexit in the UK. People voted Leave in order to ‘take back control’ – to create the ultimate ‘alley gate’, so to speak.

Many people who voted Leave had been led to believe ‘foreigners’ were coming in and jumping the queue – getting access to scarce resources ahead of ‘local’ people in need. And it is true that many ‘local people’, whatever that means, were in need, were struggling with money worries, saw their children struggle with over-filled classrooms, or older children struggle to get on the housing ladder.

But those who sold Brexit as the solution, I would argue, misdiagnosed the underlying condition. They made it binary, and they made it existential. They said ‘foreigners are to blame’ – whether those famous, faceless bureaucrats in Brussels, or those who had moved to the UK to live and work. And it is a zero-sum game: if they win, we lose.

No; the real forces and dynamics which underlay the discontent that led to Brexit, and the rise of Donald Trump, and other right-wing populists, go back much further than our membership of the European Union, as I will try to show in the next film in our video series.

The problem is, there is no alley gate (or Wall, Mr Trump) big enough to keep out the forces that are making your community feel insecure and suddenly relatively powerless in the first place, because the problem is not ‘foreigners’, not ‘others’, not ‘them’. It is ‘us’, and how you define ‘us’.

It is the act of dividing the world into ‘them’ and ‘us’ along national, or ethnic, or racial, or sectarian lines. It is the act of attempting to purify the identity of your ‘locale’ (as though the idea of ‘locals only’ did not call up an endless inquiry into what ‘local’ means).

The problems of Northern Ireland (to take only the most ‘local’ example) are not being caused by one or other side of a binary divide, but by the smooth functioning of the binary reduction machinery that keeps getting routinely wheeled out, as though if we only go at it hard enough ‘we’ will eventually beat ‘them’.

The appeal to one side, the attempt to shore up the support of a narrowly defined community of identity is doomed to failure, because that sort of self-contained identity depends on opposition to the other – that is, depends on the other. No ‘us’ without ‘them’, however hard we crank.

There is another possible approach to building a community. It is to take on, as the key, essential political task, the work of building a community of others, a community in which we – you and I – recognise that we do not share an identity, but commit nonetheless to learning how to live together as nonviolently as possible, for all our differences, on this our one planet, and in this our own wee corner of it.

And the sooner we get to that task, the sooner we will be able to get down to solving the real roots of the problem of scarce resources in our neighbourhoods.

With the news being dominated by political turmoil over Brexit, you
could be forgiven for having missed some significant developments on a
still more important matter: the future of life on earth.

Take the new report in the prestigious medical journal the Lancet, which begins with this warning:“Food systems have the potential to nurture human health and support environmental sustainability; however, they are currently threatening both”.

Actually, this is not news as such, merely the most recent in a series of authoritative warnings about the manner and rate at which our economic, industrial and agricultural system is consuming the very foundations on which the living world – including our own species – depends.

In 2017, a five-year, $60 million study revealed that we are facing a “nitrogen pollution crisis”, as artificial fertiliser use, fossil fuels, livestock waste, and sewage contribute to a doubling of nitrogen flows in the last few decades, resulting in ecological “dead zones” across the planet.

Here is a report from the US National Academy of Sciences, which, on the basis of a study of over 27,000 living species, speaks of of the “biological annihilation” we are causing; and here is another from the WWF which says there has been a “60% decline in the size of populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians in just over 40 years”.

If that’s not enough, here is a long article from the Guardian, setting out how glaciers – sources of fresh water that sustain human and other animal populations – are disappearing at an unprecedented rate. Here is another, similarly bleak story on how insect numbers are “falling drastically”.

[UPDATE 3: On 4 February, a truly alarming report on the same issue was released by a team of over 300 leading researchers, experts and policymakers, brought together by the Hindu Kush Himalayan Monitoring and Assessment Programme (HIMAP). For a newspaper summary, follow this link. To download the full report, see here.]

Earth, water, air, and consuming fire. Our fossil-fuel driven system is forcing the living world towards an elemental crisis. We are entering what Hannah Holleman calls a new ‘global Dust Bowl’ era, as a sytematic result of “increasingly extreme expropriation—in both scale and technique—of the land, of the planet’s hydrocarbon deposits, and of freshwater systems”.

None of this has an easy fix. None of the damage can be quickly reversed, nor the system quickly turned round. Which is why we can no longer waste time waiting for those who benefit from the system – many of our major corporations, those who grow wealthy by investing in them, the politicians who defend their interests – to see the light and start making changes on the scale and at the speed required.

In fifty years’ time, we will look back and see, clearly, that all the warnings were there, all the reports, all the science, all the evidence. And the record of those who refused to accept the obvious, in order to protect their own wealth, will also be clear for all to see.

This is why the Extinction Rebellion of which Tanya wrote in the last article, is so important. It is about more than climate change – important as this issue is. It is about acting on the clear evidence of unfolding systemic collapse, and the equally clear evidence that there are political and economic actors who are determined to stop the rest of us undertaking the radical action that alone will meet the elemental scale of the situation.

Lest this very scale appear debilitating – what’s the point, as one comedian said, of washing out Marmite jars when they’re blowing the tops off mountains? – it’s worth saying that if the problems are already known, so are some of the solutions. Indeed, with renewable energy becoming ever more affordable, and with the revival of interest in the US in a ‘Green New Deal’, campaigners need not simply campaign against the exploitative, extractive, ‘crank’ economy; they can also point the way towards a system that meets the needs of all within the means of the living planet, to adapt a phrase from Kate Raworth’s brilliant book, Doughnut Economics (which we discussed in an earlier post).

So if the problem is elemental, the elements of a solution are already visible; now we just need to combine them.

Some of those taking part in the Extinction Rebellion (including Tanya Jones, left). Photo: Lauren McGlynn, @mcglynnsisters (Instagram).

In our first post of 2019 Tanya Jones underlines the urgent issue that led her, along with a whole coalition of active citizens, to take part in direct action just before Christmas.

Wherever we begin, we reach the need for climate
action. Whatever it is that we care
about, climate breakdown is affecting it, and almost certainly for the very
worst.

Climate change has been seen for a long time as an
environmental issue, and of course it is.
Whether your deepest concern is for animals, birds, marine life,
landscapes, little-known species or their habitats, both present and future are
heartbreakingly bitter. The chaos of
seasons gone terribly awry, of absent or inaccessible food and breeding sites,
of places that for millennia have been homes, and now are sterile and bare, of
the first great extinction of recorded history, all this is reason enough for
grief, anger and action.

But it isn’t only an issue for the other species with which
we share the earth. Anyone who cares
about justice, who looks at our sisters and brothers with compassion and
honesty, must inevitably confront the great injustice of climate
breakdown. There is scarcely an example
of exploitation, of empire-building, of extractivism, appropriation or
post-colonial indifference which is not exacerbated by climate chaos. It is a commonplace now to say that those
least responsible are paying the highest price, but it is no less true for
being obvious.

For some, of course, neither the mass extinction of species
or the suffering and deaths of fellow humans are sufficient to provoke action. But most people wish, at the very least, for
a quiet comfortable life for themselves and their families, for sufficient
food, for undisturbed shelter and a peaceful old age. None of these can now be taken for granted,
even for present adult generations, and certainly not for today’s
children. The prospect of a no-deal
Brexit is rightly dreaded for the chaotic losses which it will bring to the
UK. Yet this disastrous scenario, with
all its concomitant bitterness, division and scapegoating, all the
opportunities seized by the unscrupulous to add more stories to their towering
fortunes, will only be a localised foretaste of our future under ‘business as
usual’. There are many reasons to seek
reduction of our emissions, but the most universal may be simple
self-preservation. It is only the most
nihilistic, the haters of self as well as others, the tragic Midases whose
fingers and minds are clogged with gold, who can look clearly at the future and
not cry ‘Stop!’

Climate change was never only the business of scientists,
environmentalists and green politicians.
But, with so many other priorities squabbling for space, too often it
was left to them. Now, though, with
scarcely over a hundred months, at a generous estimate, in which to act, it must
be the business of everyone. For business as usual is the business of
death.

Governments will not do what is needed without a clear mandate from their citizens. The necessary changes are too radical, and the vested interests too strong. But people cannot call upon their leaders for action if they do not know how urgent our predicament really is. That is why I spent a damp few hours, on the Friday before Christmas, standing outside the BBC Scotland studios on the banks of the Clyde.

Ours was part of a wider Extinction Rebellion protest, calling upon the BBC to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, about climate change. The games of inventing scientific debates where none exist, of ‘balancing’ truth and falsehood, of pretending that climate change can be overcome by small individual actions alone, all have to end. The time for games is over; we need to be grown-ups now. Our survival depends upon it.

It’s traditional at this point to look back over the year just ending, and perhaps to look forward to what’s to come. But it might be better, as 2018 comes to a close, to take a quick look back over the two years that have led to this point.

We published our first post on 25 December 2016, and our first film almost a week later, on the eve of 2017. We went on to look at the connections between the industrial revolution and the birth of modern democratic movements, local and international politics, and the development of sustainable economic democracy.

That first film, which I shot (with a compact camera) while on a brief trip to Brussels, raised some questions about the connections between power, inequality, and violence in the light of the then recent Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump.

So how do matters stand two years down the line? Well, as far as Brexit is concerned, it is difficult to see that there are any good choices ahead. The deal that the Conservatives spent two years negotiating with Brussels appears to have satisfied pretty much no one, Remainer or Leaver. That’s not to say a better deal was ever on the table, let alone easy to obtain, despite the lofty claims of back-bench politicians from the DUP to the ERG, who seem to think, like some British tourists, that it’s just a matter of going back to the continent and explaining what we want, only louder, in English.

There are two problems with that approach: one, it is far from clear even to us what we want; and two, negotiating a deal does not mean us telling them what we want and them giving it to us. Nobody who has ever had to actually negotiatea deal would ever think so simplistically.

That said, the alternatives are not much more attractive. It would be preferable to have a people’s vote, I would argue, but let us not fool ourselves that this would provide an easy route out of the mess we are in. Let’s assume there are three options on the ballot – the PM’s withdrawal deal, a ‘no-deal’ hard Brexit, and cancelling Brexit altogether. The electorate would be asked to rank these in order of preference; the least popular would be struck off; the remaining two options would be weighed against each other and the winner would emerge.

Let’s say ‘Remain’ squeezes out a narrow win. We would then immediately have a massive resurgence in all the forces Farage et al stoked in the run-up to 2016. Suddenly they would be calling for another referendum, and we would face the risk of slipping into an endless vortex of argument over Europe. Too much political energy has already been sucked into this vortex; it is impossible to predict what another few years of these arguments would do to the fabric of our society, the economy, and all the other issues we ought to be thinking about, but can’t, until we get Brexit sorted out.

But there’s no guarantee Remain would win. What if ‘hard Brexit’ won? The economic and social damage could last for generations, not just years. Those on the right who support this option believe this would free the UK to become a low-tax, low-regulation, dynamic economy off the coast of a sclerotic Europe. Quite how they think they will have more success negotiating new trade deals with scores of other countries than they have had with the EU is yet to be explained. Even if they do, the effects of turning the crank faster, in terms of inequality and unsustainability don’t bear thinking about.

Some on the left may think that such an abrupt exit might at last spur the shift towards full-blown socialism, but it is very difficult to see any clear path to that Utopia in the current situation.

Here the parallel with the US may be helpful. Two years into Donald Trump’s presidency, and it is clear that many of the worst fears of his opponents have been realised. He has continued to be divisive, feeding red meat to his MAGA-hat wearing base, while trampling on the rights of others.

He has pulled the US out of the Paris Accords; he has taken the children of asylum seekers from their parents and put them in cages; he has given huge tax breaks to the already unimaginably wealthy and has worked hard to remove health insurance from the least well-off. He has described some of those who marched with neo-Nazis as ‘very fine people’ and has appointed a Supreme Court Judge credibly accused of sexual assault. The list goes on – and on.

Yet throughout these last two years his democratic (and Democratic) opponents have organised, mobilised, put themselves forward for election in unprecedented numbers, so that when all the results finally came in, it was not unreasonable to describe November’s mid-terms as a ‘blue wave’ election.

That said, we are a very long way from bringing about anything like the sort of transformation we need. However, it appears there is some momentum in the right direction – that is, towards a more sustainable, democratic political economy. Take the newly elected Democrats’ championing of a Green New Deal – a major policy initiative designed to create a just transition away from fossil fuels and into creating decent, well-paid jobs in a new sustainable economy.

So there are hopeful green new shoots arising. But no one should underestimate the difficulties they face. Even the putative Green New Deal appears to have been watered down by the more established Democrats, and that’s before the committee is even formed.

In the end, then, two years into the Trump-Brexit era, we cannot afford to relax. There is much work to be done. The movement in the grassroots is encouraging but it is still very small in scale. As we set out into the new year, the Combination will look at some of these movements, ecological, economic and political, to see where they overlap – where it is possible to connect the dots between the issues and combine the campaigns, in moving towards a just transition to the new polity we desperately need.

And even some of those who had been rooting for a ‘blue wave’ election in the States – with the Democrats surging back to power in a rebuke to the President – may have initially been somewhat deflated by the results this week. Though they took the House of Representatives, they failed to take the Senate, and indeed Republicans gained a couple of seats there.

To make matters worse, some promising progressive candidates like Beto O’Rourke in Texas, fell just short in the end. An out-and-out racist, Steve King, was returned in Iowa, despite a spirited challenge from Democratic newcomer JD Scholten. And of course, the win in the House will do little to draw the sting from the recent appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

In some instances, it appears Republican election victories involved some shady practices. Take Brian Kemp, who has claimed victory in the Georgia Governor’s race. He spent the entire period of the election as Georgia’s Secretary of State – that is, the official charged with overseeing the conduct of an election in which he was a candidate – only stepping down from that post afterwards. Not before he had purged the voter rolls of likely Democratic voters, including a disproportionately large number of people from minority communities.

But on the plus side, the Democrats now have a healthy majority in the House. That’s important because the Trump agenda can’t just be rammed through any more, and it means the Democrats get to chair committees that can investigate, subpoena witnesses, and start to unpick some of the excesses of the Trump Administration – perhaps reverse some of that voter suppression.

In fact, the results in terms of seats don’t give a clear picture of the relative popularity of the parties – something you would think significant in a democratic process. More people voted for Democrats than Republicans at every level: by around 750,000 in elections for Governorships; around 4.5 million in the House elections; and by a whopping 12.8m in the Senate race – even though Republicans won more seats in the latter. Let’s not forget that though Donald Trump won the Presidential election of 2016, some 2.8m more Americans voted for Clinton than for him.

In another promising sign from this week’s race, there were also victories for women, LGBT candidates and members of minority ethnic groups in record numbers. The first native American women were elected, and the first Muslim women. The US now has its first openly gay man to be elected Governor. And even those progressive candidates who failed to win the seats – like O’Rourke – generated a surge in support, and helped get voters out for the other races held at the same time. Some 372 seats in individual state legislatures switched from Republican to Democratic on Tuesday night, for example. And incidentally, at the time of writing, one or two more seats could yet go to the Democrats after a recount.

Perhaps just as significantly, many Democratic candidates, it appears, refused to take corporate donations for their campaigns, instead relying on many small donations from ordinary people. This may be a good sign for the health of American democracy.

But to win in 2020, Democrats need to be very clear not just about Trump, but about what caused Trump.

For me, it goes like this.

We’ve had three decades of growing inequality in which Republicans told working class people: “sorry your jobs have been off-shored, but you can’t buck the market, and our share prices just keep growing, which is great for the economy, right? Now don’t let those Democrats raise your taxes and give the money to Welfare Queens”.

And the Democrats said “well, the Republicans are right about the market, we’ve got to have growth; but we’ll redistribute a bit of it, if we can get our rich donors to agree. Now in the meantime, try not to act like dumb rednecks!”

That is, the whole political class, including the party that was meant to represent them, turned their faces away from workers just when they needed most attention. Hammered by the right, abandoned or condescended to by the new centre-left (which was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich” in Peter Mandelson’s infamous phrase), it’s little wonder someone who appeared as champion, and gave them permission to voice their anger, appealed to many in what would traditionally have been a left-leaning constituency. No one was out there offering a more positive, constructive vision for that constituency.

But maybe, at last, some Democrats (and democrats) have begun to do so.

For me, if the Democrats want to build a winning combination in the two years before the next Presidential election, they need to move away from reliance on large corporate donations and get out among working people. Door to door from now until 2020. That’s how you build a democratic (and Democratic) movement. It’s how Bernie Sanders changed the conversation in 2016, forcing the ‘safe’ candidate (that is, the one who would not upset wealthy donors) Hillary Clinton to tack left; it’s what has propelled Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from the Bronx to Congress; it’s what saw Beto O’Rourke pick up almost half the vote in Texas. These candidates also ran on a strong, progressive platform of raising the minimum wage, rolling out some sort of public health service – but crucially they were able to meet people and make the case in person.

Something has changed in the democratic political atmosphere – the ‘demosphere’ you might say. New currents are beginning to flow. It is up to democrats on both sides of the Atlantic to help those currents to combine together, so that they may grow in strength.

Maurice considers the crash of a decade ago, and introduces our new series of short films on the theme of sustainable economic democracy.

Maurice at the original Co-op in Toad Lane, Rochdale

Forty years ago a number of political actors on both sides of the Atlantic took political power, then immediately started using it to take economic power away from the workers at the base of the economic pyramid and cranking it to the already wealthy and powerful, the big corporations and those who ran them. They did it by suppressing unions, deregulating corporations, privatising public assets and offshoring both jobs and potential tax revenues. It was known as the Washington Consensus, or ‘trickle-down’ economics. I call it the crank economy, because much more is cranked up than ever ‘trickles down’.

While the crank is certainly capable of driving up profits and GDP growth, it also drives up inequality – both in terms of wealth and in terms of power. Because those who accumulate sufficient wealth, relative to the bulk of the population, can start to fund political campaigns to ensure those who will look after the interests of the wealthy are elected, and can afford to purchase the media outlets to spread the idea that this is best for the ‘country as a whole’. Indeed, that ‘there is no alternative’.

The Washington Consensus, then, helped drive up inequality, from the 1970s onward, cranking wealth and power to a relatively small number at the top (say, the wealthiest 1 per cent), while putting pressure down on the rest of the population (perhaps around ‘the 99 per cent’).

Then, on 16 September 2008, the day after Lehman Brothers collapsed, the Washington Consensus died. Or it should have.

The entire globally interconnected financial system, it became clear, was close to collapse. Any thought of relying on ‘market forces’ to save the world economy, as the orthodoxy since the 1970s had it, was patently absurd.

It should have been obvious, from that moment on, that the economic orthodoxy which had governed the global political economy since the 1980s had been shattered.

Yet miraculously, the champions of the crank economy managed to breath a last spurt of life into the corpse of the Washington Consensus, which seems to stagger on, like the Zombies that suddenly seem to have become widespread in popular culture at about the same time.

Conservatives regained power on both sides of the Atlantic by persuading just enough voters that the best cure for the crash was to get the crank turning again as fast as possible – and by persuading them that any problems emerging could safely be blamed not on truly brutal austerity policies but on government overspending, and on foreigners (migrants, Brussels).

So is there any hope we can finally lay the Zombie to rest? Well, there are signs of life in various global political movements – a whole new raft of progressive democrats have sprung up in the wake of the election and Presidency of Donald Trump, for instance. And it has suddenly become possible to discuss, for example, the nationalisation of the railways in the UK in a way that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

Moreover, there are also signs of life in alternative economic models, both theoretical and practical. Which brings me to our new series of short videos…

For the first of these, The Zirimiri, I travelled to Rochdale in northern England, and to Mondragon in the Basque Country to learn more about the co-operative pioneers of both regions. You can watch it here.

In future episodes we will look at the co-operative movement closer to home, here in Northern Ireland, and then at some other interesting and potentially powerful politico-economic experiments going on at the moment.

‘Powerful’ being the key word. Wealth is power – this is not a metaphor. So if we can find ways for people to take economic power back into their own hands, without waiting for some heroic leader to sweep into Westminster or the White House and do it for us, then we will have begun to shift the gears, turning the crank on its side, so that more and more of the forces are directed horizontally, and wealth and power begin to flow and cycle through our own local communities.

Maurice reflects on a pair of demonstrations he attended recently, and their implications for thinking about democracy

Green Party members dance their way down Royal Avenue at Belfast Pride 2018

I’ve taken part in two demonstrations in recent weeks, one small, the other very large; one tense, the other joyous; both of considerable significance in judging where we are, and where we are headed, in Northern Irish politics.

The first took place on 28 July outside the Ards Leisure Centre (in Newtownards). The fascist organisation calling itself ‘Britain First’, having failed to make inroads in England, had decided to come here to try to exploit the anxieties and anger of disaffected Loyalists. And though there has long been a certain amount of cross fertilisation between Loyalism and the far right, whether they will make any inroads here remains to be seen. That said, we had no intention of sitting around waiting for the data to come in on that one.

‘We’, in this instance, means a group of people from diverse backgrounds and organisations who had quickly pulled together enough of a counter-demonstration to make our point. There were perhaps fifty of us in all. Sufficient to make it clear to the organisers of the fascist meeting that they would not simply be allowed to turn up and claim Newtownards as their own territory unopposed.

There were people from a range of political groups, including the Greens, Alliance, PBP, Socialists, and even one from the Ulster Unionist Party, though he stood initially to one side. If I have left anyone out please forgive me and let me know!

There were also people from Trade Unions, including NIPSA, PSC, and Unison. And there were, no doubt, other concerns citizens not affiliated with any particular organisation. Again forgive me if I have missed anyone.

The other demo, the larger by a long way, was the Belfast Pride parade of Saturday 4 August.

Here too there were people from a wide range of backgrounds and organisations. There were, obviously, representatives of various LGBTQ groups. There were the aforementioned parties (including the same UUP representative, this time with colleagues) and many more, as well as the Trade Unions. Indeed there were members of a whole range of unions present.

Why bring these demos up? A number of reasons.

First, you can’t spell democracy without the demo. Demonstrations and democracy go hand in hand, because democracy has to be active. Casting a vote every few years is the veryleast you can do, and still call yourself a democrat.

Equally importantly, democracy is about diversity. This is not just a nice add-on: it is essential to the whole concept of democracy, and this is not widely understood enough.

Take the letter published in the Belfast Telegraph on 16 July, by a correspondent addressing the decision of the Presbyterian church in Ireland to deny full membership to same-sex couples.

His argument was that, as the vote of the General Assembly was democratic, no one can oppose it who claims to be a democrat (“it was a democratic vote and each person should abide by the decision of the Assembly…how true a democrat are you when you do not encourage a democratic decision?”).

This betrays a complete, but symptomatic, misunderstanding of democracy. Democracy is not just a question of implementing the decisions of a majority. First you have to have a society in which each enjoys the same status, where each has the same standing. Then and only then do you have the basis on which democracy can proceed.

If a minority strips a majority of their standing – think of Apartheid South Africa – it’s pretty obvious it is not a matter of democracy. But that’s not because of the relative size of the factions. It is just as anti-democratic if a majoritydecides to strip a minorityof their standing. That’s domination, not democracy.

The drive to dominate increasingly seems to have taken hold at the level of state politics too.

Take the fascists mentioned at the beginning. They exploit the anxieties and perceived marginalisation of working people (and indeed many middle class people) by giving them a convenient foreign scapegoat to hate. Expel these foreigners, the thinking goes, and we would have more resources for ‘our own’ people. But leaving aside the issue of the huge contribution immigrants make, in truth, the unions – those opposingthe fascists – have done more, far more for ordinary workers than any fascist movement – or indeed than right-wing populists, who might claim to be democratic, such as Donald Trump.

Populism can sound democratic, but it isn’t. It is, however obliquely, opposed to democracy.

The populist comes along and says ‘I represent the people, not the elite’. So ordinary citizens cheer and vote for him – or her (Marine, I’m also looking at you).

So far so good. But they don’t stop there. They go on: ‘And I’m going to tell you who the people are’. Or rather (and this comes to the same thing), ‘I’m going to tell you who are notthe people’. The liberal elite. Mexicans, LGBT people, Feminists. Muslims. Or whatever other denomination suits their purpose. Catholics or Nationalists, perhaps. The British, perhaps.

Divide people (in the plural) by first denominating THE people (singular) and their enemies. Now you have two entities, rather than a multiplicity, a shifting, moving congregation of diverse people with diverse views and interests who are obliged to learn to live together.

Populism aims to dominate, not democratise.

Democracy does not aim to suppress difference by casting it in a hostile light. It aims to create a community of others, a community that respects the differences between all of us, between you and I, and attempts to accommodate those as nonviolently as humanly possible.

And it can only do this through a commitment to the principle of nonviolence and the institutions, however imperfect, that represent attempts to embody that principle – i.e., the rule of law, democratically set and adjudicated by one’s peers.

The demos of ‘democracy’ is always plural, a multiplicity, not a homogeneous block. Democracy must always be a movement towards a society of equals – a political system in which I am now in the majority, now in the minority, and my being in the minority does not give you the authority to deprive me of my standing.

Finally, we need to be clear that sometimes the populists show a cunning awareness that democracy involves protecting minority rights. We need to be alert to their attempts to exploit just that essential component of democracy.

Doubtless the fascists who came to Newtownards the other week would claim their aim is to defend, say, ‘the white working class’ as though the latter were an oppressed minority. It is a seductive routine for those who do, in fact, find themselves marginalised, in precarious jobs or out of work in a post-industrial area, and facing austerity cuts.

But their aim is not to defend the poor: it is to divide them, setting neighbour against neighbour, in pursuit of local dominance.

Better, much better, if they were to abandon the aim of dominance and join the Trade Unions and the democracy movement opposing them. Trade Unions have done far more to empower the disempowered – including the ‘white working class’ – than any fascist movement.

And the Trade Unions need to start shouting about that from the rooftops. It is good to take a stand in opposition when the fascists take to the streets, but what we need, I suggest, is a sort of Trade Union equivalent of Pride. Something that starts in opposition, a protest against marginalisation, discrimination, oppression, but which comes to embody the joyous, colourful, energetic and, yes, proud spirit of living, grassroots democracy in action.

To coincide with BBC One Northern Ireland broadcasting Ads on the Frontline (23 May at 21:00 BST) we have published this extract from Greg McLaughlin and Stephen Baker’s book, The Propaganda of Peace: The role of culture and media in the Northern Ireland peace process. In it the authors argue that a series of advertisements commissioned by the Northern Ireland Office to publicise the confidential telephone number, marked a shift in government thinking, initially about paramilitaries but also about Northern Ireland generally. In the NIO advertisements, the image of loyalists and republicans changed from that of psychotic criminals to ordinary family men and women; and Northern Ireland was transformed on screen from a place of violence and dereliction to a desirable commodity in the global market place, capable of catching the eye of tourists.

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The confidential telephone service was set up by the Northern Ireland Office (NIO) in the 1970s to receive anonymous information from the public regarding paramilitary activity. It was publicised through a variety of media but of most interest here are the television advertisement campaigns. The early campaigns were strictly anti-terrorist in orientation and fitted into the wider British propaganda framework. Terrorism had no political content or context and the terrorists themselves were portrayed as ruthless, psychotic criminals. For example, A Future (NIO 1988) features a young man reflecting on the future for his wife and child in a community dominated by paramilitary violence. What, he asks on his odyssey around his troubled city, have these ‘hard men’ ever done for him? ‘They’ve left me with no job and no hope, they’ve wrecked where I live, they’ve hijacked our cars, they’ve fed off our backs, and when I saw their kind of justice, I thought there’s gotta be something better than this.’ This voiceover accompanies images of a war-torn urban environment: bombs exploding, punishment shootings in back alleys and paramilitaries collecting funds in local pubs. The lighting is dark and the atmosphere foreboding, an effect heightened by a crime thriller score.

The NIO continued the service into the 1990s and the period of the peace process but the new circumstances brought a perceptible shift in emphasis in the advertisement campaigns. One only has to note the dramatic visual contrast between the despair of A Future and the biblical message of hope in A New Era, from 1994, in which the traditional symbols of conflict and division are transformed before our eyes into images of peace and prosperity. A paramilitary gun morphs into a starting pistol for the Belfast marathon; security bollards turn into flower displays; a police cordon turns into ceremonial tape for the opening of a new motorway; and two Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) constables reunite a lost child with his mother, confounding the controversial history and nature of the force.7

However, we want to focus here on two adverts from 1993 – Lady and I Wanna Be Like You. This is because they broke most radically from the traditional formal conventions of the confidential telephone adverts shown up until then and since. Far from the usual montage of propaganda images and messages, these ads were constructed as mini-domestic dramas that represented the paramilitary with a more human face, thus situating him in a more ambiguous position in society.

Lady tells the story of two women whose lives are blighted by violence. The ethno- religious identity of the women is not made explicit: they are both portrayed as victims. One is a widow whose husband is murdered by a paramilitary. The other is married to the paramilitary who is imprisoned for the murder. A female narrator intones, ‘Two women, two traditions, two tragedies. One married to the victim of violence, one married to the prisoner of violence. Both scarred, both suffering, both desperately wanting it to stop.’ As with A Future, Lady is about the impact of violence on domestic relations except, in this instance, violence is presented as equally tragic for the paramilitaries as it is for their victims.

I Wanna Be Like You also reflects upon the cost of paramilitary violence to family relations, specifically those of father and son. There is no voiceover narrative to this film. Instead it is accompanied by a version of the Harry Chapin song, ‘Cat in the Cradle’. It presents a man’s journey over a number of years from paramilitarism to his recognition of the futility of violence. In the beginning, he neglects his family, ends up in prison and eventually sees his son grow up and follow in his footsteps as a paramilitary. The son in turn becomes remote from the father and is shown gunning down a man in front of his child, emphasising the cyclical nature of the violence. The son eventually loses his life to violence and the advert closes with the image of his father grieving at his grave.

After the paramilitary ceasefires in 1994, the NIO commissioned a very different series of public films that moved away from the anti-terrorist message altogether. Broadcast during the summer of 1995, these made no mention of the confidential phone service or of terrorists or terrorism. Indeed, they appeared to have no specific purpose except to show off Northern Ireland as a place where people enjoyed life without fear of violence. Scored with some of the best-known songs of Van Morrison, a native of Belfast, such as ‘Brown Eyed Girl’, ‘Days Like This’, and ‘Have I Told You Lately’, the four films have the glossy look of tourist advertisements, marketing peace in Northern Ireland as consumer commodity. In the first film, Northern Irish Difference, babies and toddlers play at a crèche, oblivious to sectarian or cultural difference; in the second, Northern Irish Life, two boys from both traditions play on a beach and innocently exchange what would, in the conflict of the past, have been seen as sectarian badges of identity – King Billy for Glasgow Celtic Football Club! The third film, Northern Irish Quality, celebrates the sporting and cultural achievements of people like Mary Peters, George Best and Liam Neeson, while the fourth, Northern Irish Spirit, reminds people of the region’s stunning coastal and rural scenery. All the films in the series end with Van Morrison’s epithet from ‘Coney Island’, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if it was like this all the time?’ and the on-screen slogan, ‘Time for the Bright Side’. The use of Morrison’s music in this series of films came with his explicit permission and blessing and reveals much about the heady, optimistic mood that gripped Northern Ireland in the hot summer of 1995.

When the IRA ceasefire ended in 1996, with bombs in London and Manchester, the NIO returned to the violent imagery of the early confidential telephone advertisements. However, the restoration of the ceasefires and the negotiations towards the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 brought a return to optimism. During the referendum campaign in May that year, the NIO distributed to every home a copy of the Agreement document, its cover showing the archetypal nuclear family silhouetted against a rising sun, symbolising the Agreement as a new dawn for the people of Northern Ireland. It was revealed later that the picture was actually of a sunset and was taken in South Africa, perfect dawns being difficult to catch in Northern Ireland. Still, these idealised, post-ceasefire images marked a radical departure from the violent imagery of 1988 and A Future, and even from the more positive advertisements of the early 1990s because they dispensed with the anti-terrorist message altogether and held out the prospect of real peace and a final settlement to the conflict.

Martin McLoone (1993) was one of the first media academics to take a serious look at these government films and spot the subtle change of message in their narrative and photography. As he has argued, they did indeed appear to prepare the public for negotiations with the enemy while at the same time suggest to the IRA especially that they had something to gain by laying down their arms. However, the films may also have had the effect of giving the media licence to explore the ongoing transition from war to peace in ways unthinkable just years before.

References

McLaughlin, Greg and Stephen Baker (2010) The Propaganda of Peace: The role of culture and media in the Northern Ireland peace process (Bristol: Intellect Books)